Hamour | Redux

It's been too long since I've posted here ... and, sadly, this post is going to be fairly quick. (There will be more soon though, I promise; I was recently given a gold mine of statistical data which I plan to dig into). 

ICYMI: yesterday's Peninsula, an English language daily in Qatar, had a front page story on the declining hamour stocks. The piece makes no mention of the amount of hamour catches in tonnage (for that, see my piece here). It does, however, discuss the prices for both wholesale and retail hamour catches. Interestingly, the retail markup for hamour is much lower than it is for fish which are actually much less threatened: wholesale to retail for Kanaad, the local kingfish, is QAR 40 to 70, or 75%; for hamour, this is QAR 80 to 100, or 20%. Clearly, traders are beginning to understand that there are upper limits to how much they can charge for hamour, and are giving in to the fact that it is very much in demand.  

So, like I said, this is kind of a very quick revisit of my earlier post on the hamour dying out ... since I have the 2008 Qatar Labour Force Survey however, it shouldn't be much longer until my next, more data-rich post! 

Population Bursts and the Consumption of Hamour (Better late than never ...)

I'm sure the scores of you who started visiting this blog over the past two weeks started to worry that I might never post again. Fear not. There is a lot to say about Qatari fish stocks, and other things; and so, while I have a lot of pressing things to take care of at the moment--other fish to fry, if you will--I did want to share a few charts I cooked up to elaborate on something I'd mentioned earlier. 

As is well documented, Qatar's dramatic population surge over the past decade or so has been driven largely by the burgeoning growth of inward migration to the country. While the data from the Ministry of Environment (see previous posts) show no major increase in the numbers of fishermen or fishing boats over the last decade, what they do show is a huge rise in the amount of fish caught. 

To give a very crude visualisation of how these two are related, see below: 

The catch per fisherman of fish, overall, rose in tandem with the rapidly expanding expatriate population. 

To put this more simply, we have: 

Amount of fish caught per fisherman in Qatari waters.

What the figures show is more than just the obvious "more people eat more fish", but rather that the amount of fish caught by individual fishermen, on average, shot up at around the same time that the population was growing. Although this does not show statistical correlation, it does demonstrate a fairly intuitive idea: that large numbers of protein-hungry foreigners are moving here and, landing on a fish which tastes a bit like a cod, find it irresistible. One more plot for today can be found below.

The Orange (Or Brown?) Spotted Grouper: Dying Out? Introduction to a Series

A Hamour/Orange spotted grouper seen at a special buffet at Doha's lively W Hotel. 

In a previous life, I'd written this article on the tribulations of trying to continue a traditional life of troll fishing (not to be confused with either "trawl fishing" or "internet trolling") in Qatari waters. The article found at the link above is a very different beast from what I'd intended when I set out--the structure and the aims of the story changed considerably over the summer of 2013. What I want to get at over a series of posts on the catching of the orange spotted grouper in Qatari waters, interspersed with other posts, is the data/statistics side to the story. 

Anybody who has ever had two good meals in the Gulf knows the glory that is the hamour: it is the Cod of the Gulf, a non-fishy fish for people who don't like the taste of the sea but want its nutrient goodness. Like other groupers, its meaty, white flesh has that feeling of creamy decadence more easily found in a burger. The problem is, just like cod were at one point, they're dying out.   

Hamour brought ashore by Qatari fishing boats in tons, 2004 to 2010. Source: Qatari Ministry of Environment. 

Nobody will ever admit to that, but the data from 2004 to 2010, and published by Qatar's Ministry of Environment do not lie. Unlike the hapless fishermen I profiled for Qulture, commercial fishing boats registered in Qatar have actually become more efficient: a decreasing average number of fishermen per boat (see later posts) have been reeling in huge catches, using (fairly crude) mesh-wire traps laid in the reefs which the hamour love. As the chart above shows, in fact, they've caught so many that there might not be enough left for the future. 

Why they did this is clear. During the period from 2004 to 2010 shown above, the population of Qatar nearly doubled. Unlike countries where the population growth is natural, Qatar's population was buoyed by droves of expatriates, at all pay levels, coming to town. 

One of the first things they'd want to do after getting here is to have a hamour dinner. The pressure on the population has a seemingly straightforward correlation with the price of the prized hamour ... 

The price of hamour continues to rise, even as the catch has peaked.  Source: Qatari Ministry of Environment. 

The story gets a little more complicated though. The next post in this series is going to look at the complicated nomenclature of the groupers found in the Gulf. Just as a taster: the next time you order a hamour at a restaurant, make sure it's not soman they're giving you.